


blood money

by arriviste



Series: stories about ice [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:29:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29914182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: The horses Fingolfin's people had tried to bring across the ice had died, every one.For the prompt, "Maedhros giving horses to Fingolfin in atonement for Losgar."
Series: stories about ice [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2199744
Comments: 18
Kudos: 50





	blood money

**Author's Note:**

> I threw this up on tumblr about a year ago for @thelonelybrilliance in response to the prompt “Maedhros giving horses to Fingolfin in atonement for Losgar." I am trying to write something about the Helcaraxë and it's not coming together, so I will likely start putting up my various attempts to get my hands around it up here, and this was the first.

The Fëanorians had left the rough dwellings they built with their own hands to Fingolfin’s people and fallen back, moving further away along the lake. A kindness, from those who had had time to learn the land to those who had tramped blood-shod across the Ice? Perhaps. Flight? Certainly that. The question was why they'd fled. Flight born of guilt would be one thing; flight for fear of contagion, from pride, from lofty desire to remain apart would be something quite other.

They were all exiles now, but the Fëanorians across the lake had been exiles first. They left Tirion for Formenos rather than stay where Fëanor was no longer welcome; they left Aman for Beleriand and did what they could to make certain that they would go alone, and that none could follow. They were accomplished at withdrawal.

And they had yet given no signal that they wished to be one people once more.

They had already been falling back by the time Fingolfin brought his weary, heart-sore host safe out of the darkness where they had sounded their bright trumpets and into the twilight of Mithrim. The Grey-elves they had met with had told them where the first Noldor were to be found, and they had sought them out. And seeing them coming in the distance, hearing their horns, their sundered and sundering kin had moved to flee their camp rather than speak to them, although their retreat had not been quite completed by the time Fingolfin and his people had fallen upon them.

Maglor had been the one to speak on behalf of the Fëanorians, no weapons in his hands. “Uncle,” he had said, at the sight of one he had left on a distant shore in a distant land, and there had been no music in his voice.

In the last years in Tirion before the Exile – the first Exile – no son of Fëanor had given Fingolfin that title any longer. 

“Maglor Fëanorion,” Fingolfin had answered. He was not softened. He could not be. He had buried his youngest son among the tender flowers that had bloomed for the Sun’s first rising, and the sons he had left had begun to seem almost strangers to the people they had once been. “Where is your father?”

He had not been prepared for the unhealing grief in his nephew’s eyes, or the news of his eldest nephew’s capture. But he had had little left to offer Maglor in that first arrival: neither pity nor kindness, only cold courtesy. Maglor had offered him courtesy in turn, and shelter, and withdrawn with the last of his people.

-

Fingon had always been the one to give with open hands. The one to find brightness in the twilight, to snatch fire from the dark god.

“Uncle,” Maedhros had said, but the voice had scarcely been his, and neither had the drawn and shadowed face, nor the tormented body, the bloody stump dressed in haste and still seeping through the layers of cloth.

Pity had pierced Fingolfin’s breast, but pity was not forgiveness.

“Do not try to speak,” he had told this half-stranger, and had not spoken with Maedhros again before he, too, was removed into the far fastness of the fallen-back Fëanorians.

-

The Fëanorian host came forth from the far side of the lake in twos, in threes, in one massed sortie, leading horses such as there had been in Valinor: gold and cream and black and brown and grey, their coats almost as rich and buttery in the thin sunlight as they had been in the light of Laurelin, proud heads tossing, muscles moving with both grace and power.

The horses Fingolfin's people had tried to bring across the ice had died. They had lost them to frost’s bite, to crevasses and to the water; and to starvation, more than anything else. They had fought to keep them alive, and then they had sought to end their lives. They had cradled the heads of horses they had loved in their hands or laps as another cut their throats and wept. They had tried to do their bodies honour at first, and then they had no longer had time or resources for that, and then they had realised that those bodies were a source of food. None of the horses they had led out of Tirion had survived to step onto the shores of Beleriand and be greeted by the light of the first moon.

The horses that had come from Valinor over the sea looked healthy as they came towards the Fingolfinian camp. They had white flowers in their manes, in their tails, woven in garlands draped over their withers.

This was to be a peace deputation, then. The Fëanorians were coming to them first, not drawing out their isolation, or demanding that the younger son’s camp sued first for peace with that of the elder. They came with flowers, and not with starry banners, with flowers and not with swords. That would have meant a great deal once. If Fëanor had been coming with them, perhaps even yet it still would have. But Fingolfin could not look at the flowers and not remember the vast expanses of ice where no flowers had grown, or without remembering Argon fallen among the flowers.

Maedhros was leading the first horse, a chestnut whose glossy hide was a close match for his own hair. He wasn’t wearing Finwë’s crown. 

That meant this was a deputation from kin, not their king coming to them in might.

Fingolfin was so very weary of it all, but he could not stop calculating. His people had followed him over the ice and into the unknown, while the Fëanorians had come with the provisions and goods his people had not been able to carry themselves: they had been long years in this strange land. The Grey-elves were allied with them, and spoke of a great battle where the Fëanorians had come to their aid. They had established themselves and put down roots, and even if they were coming first to Fingolfin now, they were strong, and he and his were not.

“Uncle,” said Maedhros. There was more colour in his face than there had been after the rescue. His hair was short, but bright and clean. The empty end of his right sleeve almost escaped snagging attention, but not quite: the strange and ardent flame in his eyes could not.

“Maedhros Fëanorion,” Fingolfin said, and waited.

“Fingolfin Finwion,” said his brother’s son, and then he went to his knees.

There was a gasp, a whisper, a rustling that went around the lakeside. Somewhere, Fingolfin knew, one of his remaining sons was watching this exchange with ice in his eyes, and the other with his heart in his throat.

“I cannot give you back what you have lost,” said Fëanor’s son. “I cannot make good what you have suffered. I cannot mend the wrongs dealt you.”

True.

“I can only say, I am sorry,” said Fëanor’s son, still kneeling. “I can only say that I am ashamed; and what I may do, I will do. And in this I speak for us all.”

Maedhros was king now. But did he do so? The Fëanorians who had stopped behind him with the horses they led said nothing, and their faces were still. Was there resentment there, behind the bright eyes? Was there shame?

“And,” continued Maedhros, “in token of that, these horses are yours, and what goods they bear. They are not a gift. They are yours by right, and no one here will say otherwise.”

Now there was noise. Fingolfin’s people, behind him sighed, gasped, questioned. There was anger still. Anger that would keep them apart from Fëanor’s host in this strange land, that would keep them weak, and yet was just.

“Do not kneel to me,” Fingolfin said; then, “Nephew.”

Maedhros bowed his head before he rose. The gesture was penitent, yet Fingolfin had seen the relief of a gambit made good, and knew that Maedhros had heard precisely what Fingolfin said, and what he did not. 

It was something. _Nephew, uncle_. What it was not was _my lord, my king_. It said, we are family, and it said, and I am your elder. It said, my hands are open, and I will deal. It said, sternly, we are family, and family do not do to family what your father did to me, what your followers did to mine.

Maedhros rose less fluidly than he had knelt. That was the missing hand. The balance was not there yet, but he had come far in the few weeks of his return, and would likely go further. The mind was as sharp as it had ever been.

Fingolfin offered him aid to stand, and knew how many eyes were on them, watching. He had no doubt that Fëanor’s son did, too. And yet –

“I am sorry,” said his nephew, for his ear alone, in the moment of closeness, and it sounded as though he truly meant it.


End file.
